While your laptop probably has plenty of room for all of your applications and most of your files, you can always use more storage. Just as important, you can’t rely on that internal drive for backup purposes; you need an external Plan B should something catastrophic happen to your notebook.

For those who need a ton of capacity--and want the ability to share data with other users on a network--a network storage drive will let you tap into a terabyte or more of data, from gobs of music files and videos to years’ worth of documents. For those who need a more streamlined, hands-off solution, online storage sites such as AOL’s Xdrive and Mozy provide secure, reliable places for your files without making you go through the trouble of installing hardware. For road warriors who need to transfer or back up information on the go and have it with them at all times (sans an Internet connection), portable drives offer a surprising amount of storage--often more than your notebook--and are small enough to carry in your pocket.

We’ll walk you through the pros and cons of each approach and provide our top picks in each category. So there’s no excuse to leave things to chance.

A network drive holds much more data than an online storage site or a portable drive. Some models give you a mouth-watering 2 terabytes of data. In your home, a network drive runs much faster than a portable external drive or an online storage solution, especially when transmitting data over 802.11n (if you use a wireless router) or over Gigabit Ethernet. At home, Gigabit networking cuts file transfer times in half, so an 800MB file copies in about one minute instead of two minutes. For extreme speeds, you need Gigabit network support on your laptop, a router that supports Gigabit networking (such as the D-Link Xtreme N Gigabit Router DIR-655), and CAT5e network cables.

Once you leave home, some network drives provide a way to access your files from anywhere, using a concept called DNS (domain name system). The basic idea is that you can turn the network drive into a Web server of sorts, accessible through your own private Web site. Some vendors, such as Western Digital, insulate you pretty well from the complexity of DNS, but it can still be a little complicated and confusing.

Be forwarned that a 1TB network drive with Web access can cost as much as $700. You can buy quite a few portable drives for that price. Also, keep in mind that you can perform automatic backups only when you’re at home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peace of mind is the primary benefit of going the online storage route. Most of these sites use redundant server storage techniques that are 99.9 percent reliable, and they provide terms of use that specify how hard the company will work to protect your data.
 

Another major plus is that a good storage site is easy to use. You usually just download a simple client program or upload your files using a Web browser. Once you upload your files, you can access them anywhere from any computer.
 

The tradeoff is that the available space is limited compared with what network drives and portable drives offer. Also, depending on your upload speeds, online storage can be painfully slow; it took us 1 hour to back up a 2-hour, 640 x 480-pixel resolution movie over a 1-Mbps uplink. Nevertheless, so long as you don’t need to back up tons of video, online storage is a wise investment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Long viewed as the go-to option for laptop users who need extra storage, portable hard drives are compact and attractively priced. You can now get an extra 160GB of storage for less than $150, when the same capacity would have cost you double just a few years ago.
 

Portable storage drives connect to your system via USB 2.0, which boasts impressive speeds. Copying a 700MB file to an Iomega eGo drive took only 1 minute; that’s a full 15 seconds faster than it took to copy the same file to a network drive.
 

It’s hard to see any disadvantages with a portable drive--until you run out of room. If you tend to rip music CDs at high compression rates of, say, 320 Kbps, you’ll notice that an external drive fills up very fast. Videos, especially high-def ones, take up even more space. But if you want to have a good amount of data with you at all times, and you want it fast, a portable drive is the way to go.

 

 

 

 

 

Western Digital Passport Portable (160GB)